Introduction to Tools

The SEO industry is rife with tools to help SEOs to do their job better. The type of tool varies - free, paid, hacked together spreadsheets, thick clients (installed to your computer), web apps - but all exist to all help you do your job better. Because so many tools exist, we often get asked how to wade through the plethora of tools to find the ones that do the job best.

To that end, we’ve put together the tools that (most) of our SEO consultants use to do their everyday jobs. We’re also including a section about the tool selection process to aid you in finding the right tools for your company.

Note - Because so many SEO tools exist and they come and go, this is neither an exhaustive nor complete list. It is also a living document, so the tools listed may change as new or better tools are found.

Paid Tools

Many paid tools exist for online marketers to use to expedite and automate their work. Whereas previously checking for site errors or duplicate content was a very manual process, and sometimes you did not find out until your site had been affected algorithmically, now you are able to receive notifications from tools about your site.

Tools range from a pay-per-report model to monthly subscription models, and cover almost all of the tasks of an SEO’s job, especially linkbuilding.

Free/Agile Tools

While many tools exist to help the SEO/online marketer, many tasks also exist that do not have a corresponding feature within a larger toolset. Or, you may find yourself needing a tool for a specific task, such as collecting data, and a very specific tool is required.

Thus, SEOs will build their own tools and share them with the community, or will go one step further and teach SEOs how to build agile tools. Tom Critchlow did this in a post called How To Build Agile SEO Tools in Google Docs.